Book Review of Philosophie du Hip-Hop by Jérémie McEwen
By Colin McGregor
It is 1996. A young teenager of 16 is sitting comfortably in his parents’ living room on the edge of Parc Lafontaine. He’s listening to a documentary on the gangster rap group NWA, broadcast from the United States on their educational channel, PBS. “The sounds of Dr. Dre’s music,” he writes, “entered directly into my soul.”
This same teen, passionate about philosophy, is today Jérémie McEwen, a teacher at Collège Montmorency in Laval, where he combines his two intellectual loves by teaching a course on the philosophy of hip-hop.
His book, Philosophie du Hip-Hop : Des origines à Lauryn Hill, (Philosophy of Hip-Hop, from the Origins to Lauryn Hill) is full of street artists as well as minor, and major, philosophers. McEwen gives life to ideas that are centuries and millennia old, and shows us how we can link these ideas to young, contemporary hip-hop works.
Art reflects its society: it’s the authenticity of those rappers and graffers who reflect “the harsh reality around them,” McEwen explains.
In the book’s preface Webster, a Québec hip-hop artist, writes:
The essence of what we now call hip-hop has been present since the beginnings of human artistic activity; it’s the desire to express, to claim, to prove, to exist through creativity, be it the spoken word, painting or body movement.
McEwen reminds us that the cave walls of Lascaux, France abound with paintings 17,000 years old. The walls of Pompeii, an ancient Roman city destroyed by a volcanic eruption 2,000 years ago and preserved in ash, are packed with tags and writings that are sometimes political, sometimes religious, sometimes insults – and sometimes, just names. As the NYC tagger CAY 161 puts it, “The name is the faith of graffiti.”
We learn that the equivalent in philosophy to the “father of hip-hop,” DJ Kool Herc, was possibly Thales of Miletus, who lived 2,600 years ago. He sought the element at the origin of nature. “In hip-hop terms,” McEwen writes, “knowing where you’ve come from to know where you’re going is of capital importance.”
We learn that the autonomy of a DJ spinning their discs on the street with their own sound system is reflected by the works of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), who wrote about the importance of freedom of choice.
In this way McEwen compares artists from diverse hip-hop styles with philosophers: breakdance with Nietzsche, the German who thought about the importance of the here and now; Grandmaster Flash with Voltaire, who also observed his world with a realist’s eye; NWA with Thomas Hobbes, who preached a “dog eat dog” view of the world; Biggie Smalls with Epicurus, who loved the good life… What a great way to introduce philosophy, a mandatory subject in Cegep!
As for graffiti, McEwen observes that “canvas ranks second to walls in the history of art. Walls can be seen everywhere, bringing hope to creators that their works may become, by force of circumstance, public art. Graffiti, as an art form, is therefore not temporary at all.”
In the 1970s, New York’s first graffers put their tags on metro cars in poor areas so that they could be seen in the richer areas. Art was visible everywhere. It was the true democratization of hip-hop. “Graffiti represented the first effort by hip-hop to exist beyond poorer sections of town, and to therefore have an influence on the rest of the world,” argues McEwen. Graffers were the writers of hip-hop, since there was a destination for their writings: The Man, meaning the boss, or government. It was a way of opening up art to the masses.
The book, which in French is very readable, isn’t packed with philosophical jargon that would deter the casual reader. As those familiar with Reflet de Société and The Social Eyes will already know, the magazine is associated with the Café Graffiti, a nerve centre of Quebec hip-hop culture for three decades.
McEwen punctuates his work with interviews with four artists from Montreal’s hip-hop milieu, including our own Monk.e, a Café Graffiti graffer for many years. Hip-hop, which is at the same time the poetry and the art of the streets, is everywhere…
Philosophie du hip-hop : Des origines à Lauryn Hill, by Jérémie McEwen, published by Éditions XYZ.
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